It turns out that an SAT score of 1310 is no impediment to getting you into an Ivy League school. See here. I took the SAT twice, scoring 1360 and 1380, but with a 700 in a different category each time-- i.e., once a 700 in Verbal, and once a 700 in Math. Many colleges will harvest the best scores of each test you take and evaluate you accordingly, which is mighty nice of them. By that reckoning, I got a 1400... which isn't so different from the 1420 I just scored on the GRE.
Apologies if I seem a bit score-obsessed; it has as much to do with my current job (where the push to get kids into Ivy League schools is intense) as it does with my ambitions to move to a better job. I do realize that we're more than just a set of numbers, and having been an educator for so long, I share the ambivalence that many teachers feel toward grades in general: grades can hide as much as they reveal, and they're never a solid indicator of who we are as people. But I don't think grades and scores are inherently evil, and I don't see how any sort of standardized testing is possible without explicit, standardized norms by which to judge student performance. Societies create hurdles for a reason. In my case, there's a rather specific hurdle that I need to jump, so that's where my focus is.
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It's a bit weird reading about all these standardized test scores, I must admit. It's been so long since I've taken a standardized test... I don't even remember what I got on my SAT.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't say that you were "score-obsessed," though. Just like I'm not obsessed with the Dis.